That's not the point. The point is that apart from a handful of highly motivated people like us, people on the web spend an average of 0.8 sec evaluating a web site for usefulness before moving on. If you break the UI paradigm, you have very little chance of holding your visitor's attention. Impatience and irritation rule.

I recognise that it is certainly true that there is a bit of a convention amongst people who self-subscribe as "artist" to try and build a fancy look and feel - that abomination, the flash site is probably more prevalent on photography sites than elsewhere - but the de facto rules don't really change, even if there is a fraction more slack given.

It's perfectly possible to design a beautiful website that showcases your work in a minimalist style that has intuitive navigation that requires no working out and also works well on PCs and handhelds alike.

All you need to do to make a useable photo gallery is display the image with an arrow on one side pointing left and an arrow on the other pointing right and it is perfectly obvious what you have to do to navigate the gallery. You can make it respond to the LEFT/RIGHT arrow keys and the scroll wheel as well. The author of this gallery knew there was a usability problem because it had to write instructions on how to move from one image to another.